Stemato.com - Stephen Tompkins’ Blog

This week has been really interesting for me. I started a new job and left an old one behind. I made some great friends and really enjoyed my time at Nielsen. It was a lifetime of learning in a year. Thanks to all my Nielsen friends.

I guess the last few lines has you wondering where my career has taken me. The answer is to Atlas Solutions as a TAM. I am super excited and have been there three days but learned so much its amazing. I am looking forward to this path and all the challenges it has to offer it.

But, I digress. This post is about Twitter and the recent influx of followers I have recently received. As Twitter gains in popularity, I expect to see more notifications from people with backwards followers ratios but this week has seen a influx of dotcoms following me.

Is there something in the water that is making these folks think intruding into my lifestream will make me follow them back?

A recent report, from OfCom of the UK, about social-networking shows their prolific growth and deep saturation in the UK. I first read about it in a MSN UK story located here and I found its classification system to oversimplify these users. Surely, we can come up with a more profound classification than: Alpha Socialisers, Attention Seekers, Followers, Faithful and Functionals. It seems to only scratch the surface of what is a much more complex eco-system driven by many different types of users and scenarios.

Lets first take a look at scenarios that could evolve as a result of shifting user profiles and maturation of the space. As my company reported last month, Facebook’s numbers have slowed in recent months but its not endemic of the death of social-networking in the UK. The fact is the numbers were growing at a rate that could not have been endured much longer.

But, have they reached critical mass?

This is an interesting question, but with 23% penetration in a country that has only 30 million people total online, it would seem social-networking is still red-hot in the UK. Certainly with that kind of reach, users would fall into more than a handful of types and morph from one classification to another. In fact, I believe that user intentions on social networks are so varied and amorphous that any attempt to classify must be primarily organic.

Lets take deeper look at my organic classification system.

Instead of a linear zoological approach to classes, it should appear more as a hexagon with overlapping interest and a sliding scale. Something like this:

Using this hexagonal approach, you could then further define user personality traits based on aggregate sentiment analysis. What does this mean? If you could take a predefined number of UK social network users evenly dispersed across the three majors and parse out there profiles into text. Using that text you could then score the sentiment into different buckets (eg. dating, networking, spammer) based on keyword recognition.

Further refining your chart to something like this:

Building out these finite profiles, you get a clearer picture of social networking users and how they interact and relate to one another. The more data ascertained the better the profile. Time of day, age and other demographics can also enhance the map to show more in-depth details of how people engage.

In a very general sense OfCom gets it right, they just leave out a big part of the picture. User interactions and how they effect user profiles. My father said it best when he said “you cannot be, all things to all people.”

Yesterday eMarketer reported that online advertising spend is approaching 10% of all media spending and will be there by 2009. Considering the accountability, that digital commands and traffic quality it should come as no surprise that money is shifting to online at a quicker pace than other media. But what are some of the social media trends that this move will precipitate? Here are three that I think will be important part of my work here at Nielsen Online.

1 - Social Media become increasingly salient as connection hotspots - As trust continues to erode in traditional media, consumers will look increasingly to social media as a trusted opinion for all sorts of decisions, from which restaurant to eat at or what jeans to buy. Malcolm Gladwell describes, in his book The Tipping Point, “weak links” as influential to humans for making connections that make ideas tip. These individuals will become even more important as online migration triggers even more diverse and larger groups of connections who will exert overwhelming force over trends and ideas. (As I write this, I have over 100 twitter friends most I do not know but they shape many of my opinions on any number of things)

2- Brands continue to fortify their digital positions - With dollars shifting to the internet so quickly, brands will rush to keep up with the digital consumer migration. Brands will increasingly face the tough questions about social media and what they should do in this new platform based web. Corporate blogs are not for everyone but opening up the lines of communication can benefit brands. The question is, what is the best way to leverage social media, to empower your consumers and gain valuable insights.

3- Web trust factor becomes site currency - Inevitably, web sites will come that try to game the system and erode consumer trust in social media. From this, will arise a digital trust factor that will eventually become a web currency. It could come in an organized fashion or maybe it will just be semantic based - meaning you don’t travel far from home on the web. You have a few sites you visit and trust based on history, promotion and recommendations and only visit them frequently. This trend will hasten the move to platforms that portalize you to the web at large - Facebook applications are a good example of this in action.

As we see all media continue its move to digital, these three trends are one to watch. Any I missed?

What does it take to invent a new tool, product or idea? Ideas are born from somewhere deep down inside of us and can be as simple as Bellsouth’s Caller-ID or as complex as Google’s PageRank algorithm. Both of these inventions have something in common that is much less publicized - failure. That is right, it takes persistence and failure, to make something that improves our lives not some great creative mind.

Humility is most often learned the older you get because when you are young ego rules. I remember as a kid trying to come up with the most original and creative drawing in art classes. Its was the true test of whether you were an artist or just some hack with charcoal. We would debate incessantly classmates with great draftsmanship but poor ability to think in an agile and creative way. The reality of our situation was we were not original either. We did have one thing that set us a part drive. Because as we pontificated about the virtues of original thought we continued to test the boundaries of our own minds without fear of failure. We were free from the constraints of rigid academia to develop ideas, drawings, paintings, websites and more.

With retrospect I learned that age makes you more rigid and less willing to fail. Maybe its the reality of bills. One thing I always tried to keep in my core set of operational values is drive. Because with drive anything is possible. Dreaming big and performing agile is the combination that sets the passionate apart from the rest. I have also never lost the ability to turn my creative fire into well developed originality towards executing a better idea. Because eventually better will become original.

Don’t believe me ask Edison, Ford and Page?

I have been a loyal Wachovia customer for 14 years now but lately I have been contemplating defecting to a new bank. Why? My defection has many reasons but mostly it has to do with my personal feelings toward their treatment of me. Personal banking should fulfill three needs for me at this point: convenience, low-fees and professionalism.

Let me explain how my dilemma evolved, I recently noticed that some online company has gotten my debit card number and fraudulently charged. I have complained to Wachovia numerous times and had the loss department open a case each time. They recommended a few fixes (which have all failed) including: ordering a new debit, contact said company (I could not find a listing to contact) and close my account and open a brand new one. I am currently on fix #4 and I am not hopeful that it will work.

Wachovia has failed me consistently on three of my personal needs over the last few months. Lets look at them separately:

Convenience – I am currently averaging about 16.00 a month in ATM withdrawals from other banks. The fact that Wachovia has not strategically placed their branches in Manhattan is the number one factor. Many of the branches seem to be located on the east side. In fact, on one stretch of Third Ave. you can find three Wachovia’s within a few blocks. But if you are on the West side you have to go for many blocks before you find one. Hence the high monthly fees in ATM withdrawals.

Low Fees – The free banking is nice but I have to compromise my convenience to enjoy it fully. They charge me infrequently for all sorts of things including charges I cannot normally explain. (Wachovia – I would love to know why I am randomly charged. Can you not just give me an itemization of the charges on my monthly balance?) It is deceptive practice to just throw some arbitrary number on my statement (arbitrary because It makes no sense to me).

Professionalism – I cannot complain about the local branch by my work. They do a tremendous job of helping me and trying to fix any errors. But the phone people are absolutely abhorrent. They are usually very unhelpful and place you on hold numerous times before asking you questions about your account that you have answered three times already. I am from Georgia but the accents on some of these phone people are scary and remind me of Deliverance. Can we get them some training on sounding like a bank?

Despite all this I continue to use Wachovia and have expanded my accounts to include the “way-to-save” account. Why? I have yet to find a bank that can satisfy my three personal needs. I guess we have to attempt to get as close to those as possible until some bank comes along and totally rewrites the rules. I am waiting.

A quick Blogpulse chart showing buzz on my hometown sports teams yields some interesting results. The Miami Dolphins seems to be the talk of the town even as we see the NFL season coming to a close. It reminds me of my Dad who always laments that “baseball will never get a decent base following because all Miami can talk about is the Dolphins.”

The two spikes you see for the Dolphins are of course in correlation to the New England Patriots quest for a perfect season. (Note: 1972 Dolphins are the only perfect season in the NFL) The Miami Heat spike comes from the trade of Shaquille O’Neal to the Phoenix Suns for Shawn Marion.

Woefully, the Marlins hardly register in buzz talk. With the stadium deal close to being signed and all the offseason trades there is hardly a peep from the blogosphere. I guess it goes to show “father knows best.”

Today on Armano’s blog he mentions something called “ambient interruption.” Its about the pervasive ever-present aurora of brands in the digital space. Its true that we are facing more subtle engagements from brands everyday. Email, display advertisements and search are all forms we experience on a daily routine. Our minds are able to block out many of them but they still seep into the brain.

All this “ambient interruption” has some interesting side-effects including subsurface recall. What is this? Today’s consumer is bombarded so frequently by messages that they are able to ignore most of these ads. But some are ignored at the conscious level and soaked into the subconscious for later recall.

These messages however sit inside the mind and can infect you at any time. Do you remember seeing and ad and wondering why it was astonishingly familiar? Perhaps because you have seen it before but blocked it out only to have it find it lodged in your subconscious.

Advergirl has cited a few interesting facts on her blog about consumers online shopping behaviors from Comscore. According to Comscore, 89% of consumers shop online for product information before making a purchasing decision at a brick and mortar. This seems a bit high to me but still the fundamental idea behind it is very interesting.

These numbers seem to show a seismic shift in consumers behaviors and it only reinforces the notion that brand equity on the web is more important now than ever.

The new consumer model seems to reflect that purchase decisions start on the web and end as offline purchases in-store. What does this mean? Campaigns that are not integrated risk disconnecting the consumer from the brand’s equity and possibly losing the purchase. Integration and reinforcement of your core equities online and offline should become the basic building blocks of a great online marketing strategy.

How does a brand successfully keep its story consistent through all the various channels today? First, it should decide early on the narrative it wants to tell and make it compelling and integrated into your product. A compelling story/product will inspire buzz and reverberate into further social circles and that means increased market penetration. Second, it should assign the task of brand police to someone who has been on the team since the beginning and allow them to enforce equity. Its important that your policeman knows the narrative and can help to inform the rest of your company. There are many other steps and custom processes to branding yourself but these are a good start.

It may seem daunting but with proper planning and a little legwork and research your brand can translate its message into a great story and not risk losing the battle.